Hacker News Idea & Pain Point Finder

Find validated startup ideas and customer pain points on Hacker News in seconds. Give it a topic — get back the posts and comments where real people complain, get frustrated, and ask "is there a tool that…".

Perfect for indie hackers, SaaS founders, marketers and product teams doing market research and idea validation.

What it does

For each topic you provide, the actor:

1. Searches Hacker News (stories, Ask HN, Show HN and/or comments) via the official HN Algolia API.
2. Scans each item's title and text for pain signals — frustration, complaints, and requests for tools/alternatives.
3. Scores every item by how many pain signals it contains and returns the strongest ones, with a direct HN link.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
queries	array	—	Topics / keywords to search. Required.
tags	array	["story"]	Content types: story, ask_hn, show_hn, comment.
maxItemsPerQuery	integer	100	Items to scan per query.
sort	string	relevance	relevance or new.
time	string	all	all / year / month / week / day.
minPoints	integer	0	Minimum HN points (0 = no filter).
minPainScore	integer	1	Minimum number of pain signals to include an item.

Example input

{
  "queries": ["project management", "time tracking"],
  "tags": ["story", "ask_hn"],
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 100,
  "sort": "relevance",
  "time": "year",
  "minPoints": 5,
  "minPainScore": 1
}

Output

Each dataset item:

{
  "query": "project management",
  "painScore": 3,
  "matchedSignals": ["frustration", "has a problem with something", "looking for a tool"],
  "type": "Ask HN",
  "title": "Ask HN: Why is project management software so frustrating?",
  "snippet": "I've tried everything and I'm looking for a tool that just works…",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678",
  "externalUrl": null,
  "author": "someuser",
  "points": 142,
  "numComments": 87,
  "createdAt": "2026-01-12T08:30:00.000Z"
}

Sort by painScore to find the strongest, most actionable complaints.

Notes & limits

• Uses the public Hacker News (Algolia) search API — no login or API key required.
• Pain detection is heuristic (pattern-based), tuned for precision over recall.
• Great companion to building products: validate that a problem is real before you code it.